Back to the Start
by SVU-Obsessed
Summary: A little postep oneshot for Alex in The Other Side of This Life. My theory on why he is the way he is.


Just a little idea that popped into my head after "The Other Side of This Life". I love Alex, and they've left so many unanswered questions about him, so I thought I would fill in some of the blanks. My first Gry's Anatomy fic. . . I hope you like it!!

* * *

My shift was supposed to finish at eight. Of course, that meant I didn't get out of surgery until eight-thirty, then had to so my post-op notes, then had to check on my patients from the day, then I would finally be able to go home and take a shower.

Why was it I was doing this again?

Finally at ten-fifteen, I was finished. I had finally changed and was walking out when I noticed Eva sitting in her room, blankly staring out the window. I was tempted to walk by, but the look in her eyes. . . that emptiness. . . it was too familiar. Against my better judgment, I walked in.

"What are you still doing up?" I asked her.

She turned over, rubbed her eyes and looked towards me. "What are you still doing here."

"I'm just on my way out."

"Then you should go before the redhead decides to make you the father of her baby." She smiled a bittersweet smile. "This surgery was supposed to help me, Alex. It was supposed to make me remember who I am. What if I never remember?"

I walked over to her, trying to buy time before I had to answer. I didn't have an answer for her, at least not one she would like. Behind her, I could see the perfectly round moon, the one that made it seem bright enough to be day. Before I said anything, I rolled the wheelchair towards her from the door.

"What are you doing with that?" she asked with a slightly amused smile.

"Come on," I told her. "We're going for a walk."

* * *

"A lot of folks would kill for what you have, you know," I told her once we had slipped past the security guards who would have almost certainly told me to bring her back. Being out with her was breaking so many types of rules for so many reasons. But when did I start caring? "A clean slate. So you don't remember, so what? You'll make new memories." I stopped wheeling her and looked up at the moon. "Look at that. It's so beautiful."

"How can you be so. . . you're so good with me." Anger and sadness crept into her voice. She was frustrated, more frustrated than anyone should have to be. "What's wrong with you that you can be this good with someone you have feelings for?" Her voice lowered. "What happened to you, Alex?"

How was I supposed to answer that? Tell her the truth? Break down that invisible barrier that I had set between that part of my life and who I had become? Nobody knew. Even if I told her, I don't think that she would have been able to understand why. Or how. That my entire world was taken away from me, and it was just so much easier for me to keep to this life, no matter how lonely I got.

"Maybe I don't remember," I managed, then quickly changed to subject. "So what?"

* * *

That night Meredith, Izzie and I toasted sarcastically and downed more tequila than we should have. Meredith toasted to her dead step-mother. Izzie toasted to losing George, her supposed best friend, through some situation much more complicated than I wanted to find out about. And I toasted with them, without telling them that I was toasting to a memory.

I excused myself earlier than them, after filling my shot glass higher and higher than either of theirs. I closed my door, sat down on my bed, and put my head in my hands. The memories were back again, no way of escaping them. I thought about the bottle of tequila downstairs, about drinking until either her face disappeared or I passed out, usually the latter, but decided against it. I had to be up early, and I know she would have hated me for doing that. Instead, I sat down on the floor and brushed the shoes that had slowly build up beside my bed, and pulled out my box marked "camping gear". I knew that no one would ever be looking through my stuff for camping gear, and everyone knew that that was always a cover for a box full of porn. I opened it up and pulled out the magazines and videos I had put there for good measure, in case one of the girls decided to go snooping through, and pulled out a leather-bound scrapbook from the bottom. I took a deep breath, leaned back against the wall, and opened it up.

_Nobody said it'd be easy  
__No one ever said it would be so hard__  
Take me back to the start_

We had been born one year and one day apart. We had gone to elementary and middle school together, but I probably wouldn't have known her if I had passed her in the hall. But when I started high school, she was bumped up a grade and ended up in my classes. I still barely noticed. We had no friends in common. I was a jock, she was an honours student. I got to university of a wrestling scholarship, not based on my grades.

When I was sixteen, something for me changed. I don't know how or when, but I woke up one day and realized that things weren't right. My dad shouldn't have been using drugs and disappearing or hurting my mom. My mom shouldn't have been defending him. I tried talking to her about it once, but she shut me down, explained that it was just how musicians were. The frustration that came from that was unbearable, and one day after school was out for the summer, I decided to find a group of people like me. I stumbled upon a support group slightly out of town. I didn't want to say anything or get involved. I just wanted to know that there were other people like me.

You know where I'm going with this. Maria was there too.

To be honest, I thought the group was stupid. I didn't pay attention to what everyone else was saying, and I was ready to leave halfway through when I met her gaze. Her eyes widened, looking like a deer caught in the headlights. I thought she was going to bolt, but she stayed in her seat. I decided to stick around. When the meeting, which seemed to tick by excruciatingly slowly, ended, I made my way over to her. She kept her head down and made a big show of trying to find something in the bottom of her purse.

"Maria, right?" I asked, despite knowing the answer. She quickly glanced up, her blue eyes shining brightly.

"Yeah, that's me."

"I'm-"

"I know," she said quickly, then looked up. "Look, let's not do this. Let's not pretend that we actually care and just go back to not actually looking each other when we pass in the halls. Don't worry, your secret's safe with me." She took off quickly, but I chased after her. "What?" she asked.

"Can you let me buy you dinner or something?" The words came out unexpectedly. I had no interest in talking to her, in acknowledging that this had happened. I wanted to go back to pretending that we didn't know anything about each other. But instead I found my body having a mind of it's own, doing whatever it wanted, my brain be damned. But she knew something, she understood something that no one else ever had. She knew it just by showing up at this stupid meeting forty minutes out of town.

She turned around to face me, her hair spilling over her shoulders. I waited for her to get mad and yell at me or insult me. Instead, she looked straight at me. "I'll have dinner with you, but I won't let you buy it for me. I don't want to owe you anything."

* * *

We walked over to a sports bar, mostly abandoned in the post-lunch/pre-dinner time. We sat by the window, the sun streaming in. Neither of us said anything, so I studied her. I don't know why I hadn't noticed her before. She had long brown hair that turned red in the sun, dark blue eyes unlike any I had ever seen, and a deep tanned skin tone. She wasn't stick skinny, but had the curves that made her look like a woman, instead of all the girls that I spent my days surrounded by. She wasn't high-school popular pretty. She didn't have the blonde hair or tight jeans or stomach-baring tops. She was just. . . she wasn't like anyone I had met before.

"Who is it?" she asked softly, using her straw to push around her chocolate milkshake.

"Sorry?"

She looked up. "The meeting. You were there because of someone with an addiction. Who is it?"

"My dad," I told her before I could stop myself. Nobody knew. My friends weren't allowed over when he was around. No one had met him before. I was terrified of them finding out that Johnny Kay, that amazing drummer that everyone in town seemed to know about, the one who was renowned for his one performance with the Rolling Stones and the connect-the-dots of track marks, was actually John Karev, my father. "Heroin."

"My dad too. Scotch." She was quiet, like that was the end of talking about it. We had it out in the open, and now we had to leave it forever. Instead, she surprised me again. "My mom died when I was four. She had watched her mother and grandmother die from cancer, so she decided to get married and have kids before it happened to her. She was only 28 when she died, and my dad basically died with her. He's not a bad dad, in all fairness. He's a good person. He doesn't try to hurt me. It's just the way it is."

"Do you ever wonder if this is how it's supposed to be?"

She stopped playing with her milkshake and cocked her head to the side. "What do you mean?"

"Life. Is it supposed to be like this? Does everyone else think about whether or not their parents are going to be home, or daydream about their dad getting into rehab and sticking with it?"

She shrugged. "This is what is it, Alex. Whether we like it or not. So I can spend my time wishing for something, hoping that things change, or I can make my own life. I'm done wishing for things out of my control."

* * *

"Can I give you a ride home?" I offered once we finished dinner. I had saved the money from the fights I had won and managed to find a beat-up old car. It was a car, nonetheless, and one that I was sure that it would be my ticket to getting laid when school started again.

"I'm. . . I'm good, I'll just take a cab."

We had stayed in the bar for hours talking, longer than I had expected, and the sun was setting behind me. After talking about our parents, we had finally moved on and found other subjects to entertain us.

Okay, so I liked her. A lot.

"It's not a problem. I don't have anywhere to be."

"Are you sure?" I smiled and nodded, and she approached the car apprehensively. I was standing beside the passenger side door, fiddling with the key because for some reason it wouldn't open from the inside. I heard the click and opened the door. She started the motions to slide into the seat, then stopped and stood in front of me.

"There. . . no one knows about this. I don't want anyone to know about this."

"My lips are sealed," I promised.

"It's not that I'm ashamed, I just don't think it's anyone's business." She tilted her head down but looked up at me through long eyelashes. "You're not who I expected you to be."

"Neither are you. I have one question for you though."

"What?" she asked nervously.

"Inside," I told her softly, my hand approaching her elbow, "You said that you were done wishing for things out of your control.

"Yeah," she replied in a soft tone. Her defenses were down. This close, I could smell her skin, sweet and flowery.

"So what do you wish for now?"

She smiled slightly, then put her hand on my waist. She pulled herself closer to me, then brought her lips to touch mine. She pulled back as quickly as she had started, but kept her face close enough to mine that I could feel her breath on my cheek. "I told you. I don't wish. I make my own life." She slid into the car and softly closed the door behind her.

I started walking over to my side, but my knees buckled halfway around. I steadied myself against the car, then got in like nothing had happened.

One damn kiss and I was already putty in her hands.

* * *

Once Maria was in my life, I couldn't imagine a time when she hadn't been there. She was brutal and blunt, but caring and would lay her life down for anyone without ever thinking twice.

To my surprise, no one really questioned us being together when school started again. We'd become _Alexmaria_ or _Mariaalex_, as if we didn't exist apart from each other. Sometimes I questioned if I could ever function away from her.

And things didn't stay heavy between us. She came to my fights, she helped me with my homework, we went out to the movies and kissed in the back rows until our lips were bruised. She never once felt sorry for herself, and even though she always stayed completely supportive of me, she wouldn't let me feel sorry for myself. Overnight, she became my everything.

Then came that night. At least, back then I referred to it as "that night", not knowing that there were hundreds of other nights coming my way that would hurt me so much worse. Two weeks after Christmas, my dad had come home high, and had started hitting my mom again. I had been training hard, and I had finally learned, thanks to Maria, that this wasn't the way things were supposed to be. So after she had fallen to the ground and he was about to get down to keep hitting her when I grabbed him from behind and started fighting him back. I ended up with a bloody lip and a black eye, but before the bruise could set in, he had packed his stuff and left.

"It's okay," my mom promised me. "He'll be back." She patted me on the back, and then settled into her familiar routine of cleaning everything up for when he came home.

But he wouldn't come back. This time, I knew it. No one had ever dared to stand up to him before, to fight back. He had never hit me before. I crawled into my own bed and waited up all night to hear the key in the lock, his heavy footsteps pounding down the hall. But no one came.

In the morning, my mom came into my room and woke me up as usual. She had done her make-up so you shouldn't see the dark circles under her eyes or that she's been crying all night, or the bruise on her jaw. I claimed I was sick. We both knew it wasn't true, but she came over and put her hand to my forehead anyways. She agreed that I probably had the flu and let me stay home.

When she came home that night, she checked on me but didn't say anything. The following morning she didn't even check. We existed in total silence, and I never left my room when she was home. I stayed in bed and drifted in and out of restless sleep. I had never felt so tired in my life.

The third morning, I heard my mom leave and the doorbell start ringing incessantly. I groaned and buried my head under my pillow. It eventually stopped ringing, followed by the sound of rattling in the door. The door opened and someone stepped in. The footsteps were too light to be my dad's, too heavy to be my mom's. I rolled over to face the wall, my head still under the pillow. I heard my door open and someone walk towards the bed.

"I know you're awake," I heard Maria say. I heard her kick off her shoes, then lay down in my bed and press her body, soft and warm, into mine. She slid her head under the pillow with mine and wrapped her arms around my waist. "What happened Alex?" she whispered, then kissed the nape of my neck.

I hesitated, then let out a long, low breath. "Nothing," I muttered.

"Bullshit." She pulled the pillow off of my head. "What happened?"

I closed my eyes, preparing to say the words out loud for the first time. "My dad left." I rolled over to face her. "I hit him and he left."

She brought her fingers up and gently touched where my lip had split open. "What were you supposed to do? Just let him hit you? Hit your mom? Alex, you did what you had to do to protect someone you love. If he left, it's not your fault."

My lip was burning beneath her touch. I brought my arm around her and just barely pressed my lips against hers. The block of ice I felt like I had been living in for the past three days was melting. I was being revived, brought back to life. She raked her fingers down my bare arms, then started pulling at the hem of my tank top.

Sex had been the one point of contention in our relationship. I, like every other sixteen year old guy, wanted to have sex. She wanted to wait until she was in love. I had tried to convince myself that I was in love before, but I just couldn't convince myself to lie to her. Against every fiber in body, my brain compelled me to pull away from her. I was literally shaking in withdrawal.

"I don't want you to do this because you feel bad for me." Half of that was probably true.

"I'm not," she promised.

"Then why now?"

"Because whether or not you love me, I'm in love with you."

I looked at her in front of me, her hair still wet from her shower, her skin smelling like flowers. By just being here, by being the one person that could possibly understand what was going on, the only person who I would talk to about what had happened, I finally stopped trying to convince myself. I finally saw what was right in front of me.

"I love you," I whispered.

And I meant every word.

A knock of the door broke me away from my memories. Without waiting for a reply, Meredith came in and stumbled over to sit down beside me.

"You okay?" she asked, her voice sounding much more sober than her coordination suggested. "You left pretty fast."

I smiled. "I'm fine. Just tired. What about you?"

She shrugged. "She wasn't my mother."

"That doesn't make it hurt any less." She looked down at the picture I had taken out of the scrapbook that I still had in my hands.

"Who's that?" she asked.

"Uh, she was my girlfriend in high school." Well, it was true.

"She's pretty. You look pretty goofy in a suit though. Although at my prom time I had pink hair and six earrings in each ear, so I can't say much."

So she thought it was a prom picture. That would be so much easier for her to forget about it if she remembered anything in the morning. "Don't worry, I'm leaving. As soon as the room stops spinning." She put her hand on my knee to help hoist herself up, said goodnight and closed the door behind her.

_I had to find you,  
Tell you I need you,  
Tell you I set you apart,_

Maria was the valedictorian at our graduation. It didn't really come as a surprise to anyone. She had been offered a free ride everywhere she had applied- Yale, Princeton, Vassar- but instead she accepted at Iowa State, where I had been offered a full wrestling scholarship. We were assigned to different residences, but still saw each other several times a day. We both had roommates, but still managed to spend at least three nights a week together. She had entered pre-med, determined to find at least a treatment for cancer. Not having any idea what I wanted to do, I went into kinesiology, hoping to get into sports medicine. If nothing else, it would get me a job as a trainer.

At school, no one had ever known us as two separate people. It was the first time in our lives either of us had felt free from our homes and the responsibility that came with it. Maria bloomed, making the Dean's list first semester and pushing me to study harder. She took up running so she could train with me. She was happier than I had ever seen her before. We got to be frivolous, staying in and watching bad movies, eating nothing but pizza for days at a time when I wasn't training, going out dancing all night, and having loud sex anytime we felt the need, despite the people next door yelling at us to keep it down.

But of course, things had to change. A month before second semester exams, I was alone in my residence when the phone rang. Maria had a presentation the next morning and had asked to get some sleep. My roommate picked up, waking him just after he had gone to sleep. He threw the phone at me. I swore and picked it up, expecting it to be my mom, telling me she had heard something about my dad. I always expected the call. Hoped for the hall. If not for my sake, then for hers, because if she knew what had happened maybe she would move on instead of making dinner for two every night in the hope he'd be home to eat with her.

But it wasn't my mom.

"Alex," Maria's voice came from the other end, panicked, upset. "Alex, I need to see you."

I sat up and turned on my light. "I'll be right there. Are you okay?"

My roommate groaned and pulled his pillow over his ears.

She paused. "No," she whispered.

I hung up and had the presence of mind to at least pull on jeans and a sweatshirt. I bolted over to her residence, where the guy at the front desk waved me up. He was used to seeing me.

The door to Maria's room was open but dark. She was sitting on her bed with her head in her hands, sobbing. I felt my heart stop. I had never known anyone as strong as Maria, I couldn't think of any time I had ever seen her this upset. I sat down beside her and put my hand on her back. She jumped, then looked up at me.

"What happened?" I asked.

"He. . . there was. . ." her breathing became heavier and heavier, her voice sounding more panicked. "I can't breathe." She looked up at me, then bolted out of the room.

I followed her down, out of the building. She threw up in the bushes, still hyperventilating. I pulled her over to a bench, wrapped my arm around her back and tried to get her to calm down.

"It's my dad," she whispered.

* * *

Maria's dad's death was the ultimate irony. He had been out at his favourite bar, and found himself too drunk to walk home. The bartender called him a cab. On his way home, a drunk driver ran a red light and hit the cab. Her dad was killed instantly.

There was no funeral. I went home with her to close up his house. I held her hand when she went to identify his body. And I sat with her while the groundskeeper buried her dad's urn beside her mom's.

"It's better for him," she said softly, watching the urn being lowered into the earth. She rested her head on my shoulder but wasn't crying. "He died with her." We stayed sitting beside the grave until the sun set. She stayed calm, almost at peace. She never once felt sorry for herself, instead trying to hope for the best for him. At nineteen, she was an orphan. I thought maybe it was good. Maybe a person could only have so many bad things happen in their life. Maria had certainly filled her quota; she should have gotten the chance to be happy for the rest of her life.

But the hits just kept coming.

* * *

That summer we stayed near the university. She had gotten a job as an assistant in the lab, and I got a job at the local gym. We rented an apartment not far from the university and made friends with the other couples in the building. No one told us to keep it down when we were having sex anymore.

It was one day in October when things changed again. I had come home tired and annoyed after a particularly grueling midterm and just wanted to veg out. Maria, who was supposed to be at work at the time, was home, sitting on the bed, waiting for me. She had been crying, but looked calm. The only time I had seen her cry before was when her dad had died. I knew it had to be something big.

We had settled into a routine, more of a routine than I liked. We took the relationship for granted. I knew that it was supposed to happen to everyone at some point, but I had hoped we would be exempt from it. I felt like we had been together forever, both a good and a bad thing.

"What's going on?" I asked her cautiously.

She nervously pulled her hair to one side, then started picking at a loose string in the bedspread. "I don't know what happened."

I sat down beside her. "What do you mean?"

She sighed and turned towards me. "I mean, this shouldn't have happened. I didn't mean for it to happen. I don't know how it happened. And I have no idea what happens to us from here. I always know what I'm going to do, I always have a plan, you know that. So now I'm just. . . I don't know."

"Maria. . ."

"I'm pregnant," she blurted.

I looked down. Pregnant. _Pregnant?_ It didn't make sense. My girlfriend couldn't be pregnant. "But. . . how? I mean, we're careful. . ." In retrospect I sounded like an idiot. But it was all I could think of at the time.

"You know nothing's foolproof. . ."

Yeah, I knew. But I didn't thing that it would happen. I stood up and started pacing. I didn't even know if I wanted kids. If I did want them I wanted them with her, but after the father mine had been, I didn't think I had any business being anyone's father.

"You can't have it," I blurted without thinking.

She stared at me incredulously. "You want me to have an abortion?"

I sank down into the bed again. Somehow, in my head the opposite of having a baby wasn't having an abortion. The opposite was just. . . the problem going away.

"No. I just. . . I don't know Maria. I need some space. . . I need to think."

She got up and glared at me. "Don't let me get in your way." She stormed into the bathroom and slammed the door. I left.

* * *

I walked around in a haze for the next couple of days. Nothing made sense. I crashed with a wrestling buddy of mine, stayed out far to late drinking. I couldn't process this situation. This no-win situation.

Finally, clarity dawned on me during a run. I didn't want to have a baby. I didn't want Maria to have a baby. I didn't want her to get rid of it or to put her into a situation where she had to make that kind of decision. What I did know is that I loved her. I would do anything for her.

She was lying on the couch when I came back home. She didn't look up from the book she was reading. I didn't blame her. I went and sat down against the couch.

"I'm sorry."

She didn't look up from her book. "I'm sure you are."

"I fucked up big time. I know that. But I've done some thinking. A lot of thinking. And whatever you want to do, I want to be there with you."

She finally let the book down and looked at me. "Do you promise?"

I vaguely felt like I was signing my life away, but I pushed that thought out of my mind. "I promise."

"I can't do this without you Alex."

"You don't have to."

* * *

I took her out for dinner that night. Already I found myself changing. I watched what she ate, made sure that no one was smoking in the restaurant, and insisted on her getting desert. I bought her a charm bracelet and had a tiny gold baby bottle put on it. I went to bed with her that night terrified and excited.

I woke up in the middle of the night a week later. Something had woken me up. I looked at the clock- 2:04. Then I heard it, the noise that had woken me.

"Alex," Maria was gasping. "Alex, something's wrong." I rolled over to see her doubled over, paler than I had ever seen. She reached out for my hand, but could barely squeeze. I pulled back the cover to find the sheets soaked in blood. I felt my heart start pounding. I froze for a minute, then snapped to my senses and called 911.

The paramedics took forever. They had trouble getting her into the elevator, and fought me when I tried to get into the ambulance. She asked them to let me in and I rode beside her. I'd never felt so helpless in my entire life.

She was unconscious by the time we got to the hospital. The doctors refused to let me in with her, and wouldn't tell me what was going on because I wasn't family. I paced around the waiting room, bought some bad cafeteria food that I never ate, and got her flowers from the gift shop when it opened.

"Look," I told the doctor when he left her room. I still hadn't seen her, I still had no idea what was going on. I couldn't take it anymore. "I'm not related to her, but I'm the father of her baby and-"

The doctor shook his head, his eyes sad. "By the time she got here. . . it was too late. I'm sorry."

Sorry? _Sorry?_ As in I'm-sorry-that-your-baby-died-sorry? "No, Maria, she's healthy, this must be some kind of mistake.

"Sometimes there's no reason that we can find. If the baby's developing without a brain or with severe problems. . . nature can just take over." He hesitated, then put his hand on my shoulder. "I'm sorry son."

My blood ran cold. It was completely impossible. To just be here one minute, gone the next. That baby, that baby that was part of me just died for no reason that anyone could tell me? I actually felt my insides ripping apart, my lungs burning, refusing to inhale. "Maria?" I asked.

"She's in stable condition. She lost a lot of blood, and she's pretty drugged up, but she's conscious."

"Does. . . does she know?"

He nodded solemnly. I stared at her door, wondering how I could possibly go in, possibly face her after this. How could I, who barely wanted this baby, feel my heart being broken into a thousand pieces, see her, who loved this baby more than anyone ever could ask for? I had no right. But I couldn't let her go through it alone.

I opened the door. She was lying on her side, facing out the window, now bright and sunny. She was hooked up to machines, pale, her hair was messed up. I put the flowers down on the table beside the door and went over to her. She still didn't respond to me. I had to idea what to do. I knew that she needed me though, like I had needed her so long ago. So I slipped off my shoes and climbed into bed with her, wrapping my arms around her chest, careful to avoid anywhere on her waist she might have been hurt. She didn't respond.

"Maria," I whispered. Her whole body relaxed, and I realized just how rigid she had been.

"It was a girl," she whispered to herself. "We had a little girl."

Dawn was breaking. As the winter was slowly turning into spring, the sun kept coming up earlier and earlier. My muscles had seized up from sitting on the floor for so long. I stood up, rolled my shoulders, and checked the time- 6:23. I didn't have to be at work for another three hours. I sighed and knew that I wasn't going to sleep. I grabbed my towel and hopped into the shower. I changed, only to find that the time had barely passed. I looked down at the scrapbook and quickly put everything away, carefully stacking all the porn on top. I packed my stuff, took some aspirin for my hangover, and decided to run to the hospital instead of driving.

The run didn't clear my head as much as I had hoped. I got to the hospital, bought the biggest coffee from the omni-present coffee cart, and headed up to the ICU.

None of the nurses questioned me coming in hours before my shift, or going just to see Eva, especially with no scrubs. I wasn't there as her doctor. I was there as her friend. I was going to tell her, explain to her why sometimes you needed so badly to forget. That it wasn't about the bad things that happened to you, it was the bad things that happened to the people you loved. Love. But really, I was probably there more for me than her. No one knew about Maria, and I intended to keep it that way. Eva wouldn't tell anyone, and even if she did. . . who would she tell?

_Come up to meet you,  
Tell you I'm sorry,  
You don't know how lovely you are,_

I knew no one would question me missing a couple of days of class. Maria called into her professors and explained that she was sick. No one would question that from the girl with the highest GPA.

We took two days and drove back home. She didn't want to see anyone, but didn't feel right not doing something to remember her baby. Our baby. That almost was. So we found a small white granite slab and had it engraved very simply. _Serena Karev. Daughter of Alex and Maria. _We obtained special permission from the groundskeeper at the cemetery where her parents were buried to put it with them. We sat in a pile of leaves that hadn't been picked up and held each other silently for hours.

"I thought maybe," she whispered. "I thought maybe this was it. This was my chance to have a family." I looked down at her to see her eyes red from crying, her cheeks rosy from the cold. "I'm alone, Alex. My parents are gone. There's no one else."

I held her tighter. "You've got me."

She sighed. "I know. It's just. . . it's not the same. If I get sick they're not going to let you see me and. . . it's not even about that. I just thought that I'd have someone who I was really tied to."

"Then marry me."

She pulled back and stared at me wide-eyed. "What?"

I felt as shocked as she sounded. Those words player over in my head. I had no plans to ask her to marry me. Not now, anyways. Not something I had thought about too much. But the words had come out, and I didn't regret them.

"Marry me."

* * *

So we flew out to Hawaii that night. I booked us a hotel on the beach that would max out my credit card, but I didn't care. The next day, she bought a white dress and white flowers, and we got married on the beach. The hotel bumped us up to the honeymoon suite. Maria was still recovering and couldn't have sex, so we sat out on the deck and watched the sun set over the ocean, the salty breeze flowing across us.

The ocean air had curled up her hair, and she felt warm to the touch from spending too much time in the sun. Still in her white dress, she curled up against me. For the first time ever, we were away from everything, everyone. It was only the two of us alone in the world. And for the first time, I saw her coming apart at the edges, her insecurities and vulnerabilities spilling out. Her eyes were still sad, a shimmer that had once lived had sparked out. Losing the baby was harder on her than I thought it would be. It was on me too. I didn't think it could hurt so badly. But she needed me. I stroked her new gold band, admiring the way it looked so perfectly when she slipped her hand into mine. I had been putting my left hand into the sun as much as I could. Even if they made me take off the ring for a fight, I wanted to be able to see the line.

"I love you," I whispered. Random displays of affection weren't my style. I didn't know how to do it. It always sounded too forced, too rehearsed.

"I love you too," she slowly answered. "That why I think we should get an annulment."

"What?"

She sighed but didn't look up from where she was sitting. "You were upset when you asked me, Alex. You did it to help me feel better. And you have no idea how much it means that you would even consider doing something like that but. . . but I don't want you to feel forced to be with me."

I tried to find the right words to say. To play them through my mind before my mouth opened. But it didn't work. My mind went blank, and my mouth took over.

"You know you were my first real girlfriend, right?" I felt her nod against my chest. "Then you should know that I don't know how to do this. I don't know all the right lines to say. I know that I don't have any poetic way to tell you that I've never seen anyone as beautiful as you. I know I don't come home with flowers and my valentines day cards are generic. I don't tell you I love you as much as I should. And I'm sorry for that. It's not fair to you, not at all. You deserve so much more than that. But. . ." I got up off the swing we were on and knelt down to face her. "I've never loved anyone like this, and I don't plan on ever loving anyone else. You are the most beautiful woman that I've ever met. And I want to spend the rest of my life with you."

And I really did.

* * *

The view from any of the rooms at Seattle Grace were amazing. Somehow they had managed to avoid the view of the parking lots and all you could see was lush grass and green trees. On mornings like this, the few that there were, when it was actually sunny, it was enough to make you forget that it had rained the past three weeks straight.

"Didn't you just leave?"

I looked over to find Eva squinting at me. I had forgotten where I was, why I was here, until I heard her speak. She smiled at me. "What are you doing here?"

"I thought I owed you an explanation."

"You don't owe me anything Alex." She rubbed her eyes. "Why aren't you wearing your scrubs? And why do you look so serious? What's going on with me?"

"It's nothing, you're okay, I promise." I watched her watching me for a minute. "You asked me last night what happened to make me the way I am." I pulled out my wallet, pulled out my drivers license, and pulled a wallet-sized picture from the compartment. It was almost impossible to get out, and if you didn't know it was there, you wouldn't be able to find it. It was a smaller picture of Maria and I, the picture that Meredith had seen. I had taken to keeping it with me, for those moments of panic when I couldn't remember what she looked like, how her smile curved, her eyes squinted. It was a picture of us from Hawaii. From our wedding day. I handed it to Eva.

"Who is she?"

"My wife," I told her, the words slipping out of my lips for the first time in years. "Or, I guess, she was."

She didn't look away from the picture. "You look happy."

"I was happy."

"Then why would you want to forget something like this?" She lowered the picture and looked at me.

"We had a baby together. A daughter. But she died before she was born."

"You look young in here."

"20."

"So what happened?"

"Breast cancer. When she was 22."

"She died of cancer?"

"She knew that it was going to kill her, she just wanted to prolong her life as long as possible. So she had palliative surgeries before she was even that sick. She died from complications in one of those surgeries."

"But how does being an ass to everyone else make it any better?"

I sighed. "After she died, I dropped out of med school for the year. When I came back, no one asked about her. They knew that without her. . . I was a different person. I wrestled and drank too much, studied hard, slept with a lot of women I shouldn't have. The idea of caring about someone like that again hurts too much. So I figured if I changed who I was, if I made myself completely unlovable, it wouldn't happen again."

"Do you miss her?"

"Every day."

"Does anyone else know?"

"No one."

"Then why are you telling me?"

"Karev!" Eva and I both jumped. I turned to find Bailey standing there with Izzie and Meredith, both looking very hung over, O'Malley and Cristina. "What the hell are you doing? Rounds started 10 minutes ago."

"Sorry. I'll. . . I'll catch up in a minute."

"No, you'll catch up _now_." She glared at me. I turned back to Eva.

"Another time, I guess," I apologized. I ran off to the locker room, the rest of Maria's life playing through my head. The way I had planned on being there to hold her when she slipped away, so she wouldn't be afraid and alone. The guilt I still felt that she died on an operating table, cold and scared. The way it poured the day of her funeral, so heavy that the church made mourners take off their shoes. And how I buried her next to her parents, beside our daughter. How I bought the last space beside them, so one day I could be with them again. I felt like I had been left behind, the odd man out, the one who was left to pick up the pieces after everything was said and done. I took one last look at the picture I had pulled out, traced the outline of her hair, then quickly put it away, stuffed my wallet into my pocket, and found myself leaving the past, running into the present to present my patient at rounds.

It's the only way Maria would have had it.


End file.
